


The Lost Years of Cordelia Goode

by katiemickgee



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Coven, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2018-01-01 09:42:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1043341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katiemickgee/pseuds/katiemickgee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you're the daughter of the Supreme, there are a lot of expectations heaped on you.  When you're also a young woman just trying to live her life, there are a lot of expectations you want to tell everybody to shove.  So when Cordelia is offered the chance to interview at three prestigious magic schools in Europe, she leaps at the chance to escape Miss Robichaux's, New Orleans, and, above all, her mother.  But Fiona Goode will not be ignored, and she always gets her way.  It will take everything Cordelia has for her to find small outlets of rebellion and carve out a life for herself outside of Fiona's shadow.</p><p>A drabble, in which Cordelia heads to Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, and Durmstrang, in hopes of finding work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lost Years of Cordelia Goode

When she’s very young—perhaps too young, Cordelia realizes now, lying blind in a hospital bed with the weight of twenty more years pressing down on her—Cordelia leaves home for the first time to seek employment across the Atlantic Ocean.  As the daughter of the Supreme, and a quiet contender for the role herself, she has her pick of teaching jobs in the States.  The place in Salem just lost a witch on maternity leave and Brakebills hasn’t been doing well lately, practically purging faculty as their numbers dwindle.  Cordelia is royalty, and the other schools are scrambling to win her affections.

Before she leaves Miss Robichaux’s, hopefully for good, the current headmistress makes a last ditch effort to make her stay, practically begging her to take over running the school.  No one’s seen Fiona in months—maybe years, now; Cordelia forgets sometimes—and she’s clearly uninterested in running the school.  Not like Cordelia, the headmistress says.  Cordelia is a good girl, with a good head on her shoulders.  She is gentle and patient and kind, and she could lead these young witches to greatness.  Cordelia Goode is only eighteen years old at the time, but as the daughter of the Supreme, she has the power to take the spot.  For her sanity, though, she won’t do it.  She flat-out refuses, the first time in all her eighteen years that she’s found the confidence to do what makes her happy.

Myrtle Snow drops her off at the airport, walks with her to the security checkpoint, then hugs her hard and wishes her luck.  “They’ll love you,” she says, beaming with pride in her eyes, just the way Cordelia always thought a mother should.  “You’ll have them fighting for you.”

“Thank you, Myrtle.  Thank you for everything.”  Cordelia hugs her again and kisses her on the cheek, just once, as if daring Fiona to appear and demand to know what’s going on.  At this point, with her passport and ticket in one hand and her carry-on bag in the other, Cordelia doesn’t care if Fiona shows up or not, and if the hag were to put in an appearance, Cordelia would tell her exactly what was going on.  Myrtle had friends in England who worked at a school, a remote but prestigious place, older than dirt, full to the brim with witches and wizards and what have you.  Myrtle had helped Cordelia send word to the right people, via the rather primitive owl system, and she’d put a young girl with a dream on the path to finding herself.  Myrtle had been a mother to her in all those years Fiona decided it was no longer her responsibility to do it, all those years Cordelia needed her most.  So Cordelia cries at the thought of leaving Myrtle, but holds her chin up and puts on a brave, shaky smile for the older woman, and thinks no more of Fiona.

She flies to London Heathrow, like a normal person, via JFK in New York, and the twelve hours on the plane are the longest she’s ever been away from the sad facsimile of home that Miss Robichaux’s has become for her.  Cordelia has three job interview lined up over the next two weeks, interviews that will take her across the entirety of Europe and show her things she’s only ever read about, up until now.  As the daughter of the Supreme, she should have grown up knowing these things, seeing these places.  But Fiona has always preferred to travel alone.

At Heathrow, she’s picked up by a big man—an _enormous_ man—with a flying motorcycle.  She and her bags scrunch unglamorously into the motorcycle’s sidecar, and he pats an oversized black helmet that makes her think of the Nazis in _The Great Escape_ onto her tiny head and says, ”Watch that pretty melon a’yers, Miss Goode.”

They fly—decidedly unlike normal people—to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where her arrival causes quite a stir.  She’s wearing a long trench coat over nice slacks and a blouse, and the cloak- and tie-clad students look at her like she’s a three-headed dog in their midst.  Cordelia will spend four days here, so for that first day, she mostly huddles in her room in a high tower and adjusts to the new time, the new climate, and the new taste of the tea a tiny house elf brings her on a sterling silver tray.  On the second day, she is brought to meet, first, with Minerva McGonagall, who unnerves her, and then with Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster, who mistakes her for a student and asks which class she’s skipping to speak with him.

Professor McGonagall reminds Cordelia very much of Myrtle.  When she accidentally lets the stray thought slip out, Professor Dumbledore asks if that’s Cordelia’s mother.  It’s awkward to explain that she isn’t, but Cordelia does, hoping they catch the note of disappointment in her voice.  Professor McGonagall and Myrtle apparently go “way back,” though both women kept mum about whether or not they’d shared run-ins with Fiona in their day.

Professor Dumbledore seems to like her, from what Cordelia can tell.  She first meets him in his office in the afternoon, where they drink tea and the Hogwarts head master introduces her to Fawkes, an honest-to-God phoenix, and whichever past headmasters are lounging in their portrait frames.  He quizzes her about what he calls “muggles,” meaning the normal people Cordelia has always envied, and teaches her a few of the spells the typical Hogwarts student would learn during dinner.  She’s using a borrowed wand and she’s anxious, but she turns a rat into a glass on her first try and almost calls her mother to gloat.

For those four days, Cordelia does more magic and feels more like a witch than she has in her entire life.  She pets all three heads of a sleeping dog and sometimes take solace in simply riding the staircases around in circles.  She sees pictures of dragons and hears about people who raise them in Romania.  She lets some of the students read her their charms essays and potions recipes, and she’s never learned more in her life. 

She gets to watch a Quidditch match, Gryffindor versus Slytherin, and one of the Gryffindor first years gives her a crimson and gold scarf to wear.  She hovers three feet off the ground on a Nimbus 2000 and has to use every ounce of restraint in her body not to take off into the Forbidden Forest, never to be seen again.  The witches of Salem may have been related to English witches and wizards, but this level of magic would turn their Puritan sensibilities on their heads.  She wonders why American witches aren’t taught about wands, cloaks, and broomsticks.

She spends all of her third day in the greenhouse with the rotund Professor Sprout.  There are plants in this world that Cordelia has never dreamed of, used to create potions her mother would kill to have—truth serums, luck potions, elixirs of life and love that no one at Miss Robichaux’s had ever thought to attempt.  _Until now._   Cordelia plans to bring her knowledge home and show off for Myrtle.  Maybe she can make her mother care, if she can give her the eternal youth she’s yearned for since her daughter’s birth.  Cordelia reminded Fiona of the time she was losing, the moments and experiences she was supposed to be freely handing to the next generation.  Fiona has never been a woman to play nice.

On her final night at Hogwarts, Cordelia meets again with Dumbledore over fire whiskey and learns a bit about his tenure as headmaster.  She listens to him as he talks about Voldemort, without fully understanding who the guy is, and she notes it away to mention to her mother, should she happen to stumble upon her back Stateside at some point in the next decade.  He lets her go to sleep around midnight, giving her an affectionate pat on the back and a warm smile.

“I think you’d make a fine addition to our faculty,” he reveals.  “I’ll have someone escort you to Beauxbatons in the morning, but I do hope you’ll keep Hogwarts at the top of your list.”

It’s the highest praise Cordelia feels she has ever received.  She thanks the headmaster and manages to find her way to her quarters without getting lost once.  The next two places will have big shoes to fill.  Cordelia already starts planning her Muggle Studies lesson plans, letting the days of her dreams lull her to sleep like leaping sheep over an imagined farm fence.

The next day, Dumbledore himself comes up to Cordelia in the Great Hall and extends his arm.  She finishes her pumpkin juice, gathers her bags, and allows him to lead her from the table.  They talk as they cross the courtyard, then the bridge over a seemingly endless gorge, until Dumbledore grins and asks if she’s ready.

“For what?” Cordelia replies, dumb, and as the words leave her mouth, Dumbledore’s hand on hers tightens, the ground falls away, and the scenery blurs.  Cordelia stumbles to a half in a small village, somewhere surprisingly warm and picturesque, and Dumbledore is already shaking hands with someone in a pale blue uniform and gesturing back to Cordelia, sprawled on the ground and hurrying to gather up her bags.

Out of the mist comes a woman, who greets Dumbledore with affection and then has to bend almost double to say hello to Cordelia with kisses on each cheek.  This is Madame Olympe Maxime, headmistress of the Beauxbatons Academy of Magic, and she, like Hagrid, is half-giant.  The young woman in blue is one of her charges, a beautiful girl named Fleur.  Dumbledore shakes Cordelia’s hand once more, assures her she’s in good hands, and disappears into thin air with a loud crack.

Cordelia is slated to spend just three days in the French countryside, just outside Cannes, and she makes the most of the precious hours she has there.  She’s no longer jet-lagged, so she leaps right into the interview with Madame Maxime, who sometimes slips into foreign tongues and, despite being half-giant, has a beautiful, tinkling little laugh.  At dinner, Cordelia feasts on rich French cuisine with the student body and loses herself into the jumble of languages in the dining hall.  It’s mostly French in the hallways, but some of the students are German, Austrian, even a few Italians, and she ends up sitting near an English girl who has a brother at Hogwarts and another working in the Ministry, whatever that is.

Cordelia tries to explain the idea of a Supreme to these European magic folk, but they look at her like she’s crazy.  She has Madame Maxime explain the Ministry of Magic in as much detail as her limited English will allow, and she understands why the idea of a single woman leading the entire collective of witches in America must sound ridiculous to such a well-established group of individuals.  She’d thought them the primitive ones, living in their castles, away from the rest of the world, when she’s seeing now that it’s America that’s been left far behind.

She wakes early the next day to walk the grounds, and it’s beautiful here.  The hills are lush with grass and flowers, even in the fall, and they roll away to the sea.  Cordelia’s grown up mostly with the Gulf of Mexico, so the sight of a new port, even from a distance, is a pleasant change of scenery.  Fleur finds her and drags her to sit in on some kind of spellcasting class that Cordelia can’t follow, in part because it’s taught mostly in French, and more because she has never learned this branch or style of magic.  There are eleven-year-olds in the room who duel better than Cordelia knows she ever will.  She decides, then and there, to get herself a wand and as many textbooks as she can get her hands on before she heads home.  She’s going to teach herself this European style of magic, regardless of how the job hunt turns out.  Like art, it’s just another one of the things the Europeans excel in and the Americans try to emulate, without great success.

In the afternoon of the third day, an older boy meets Cordelia in Madame Maxime’s office, her guide for the day.  He isn’t much older than she is, but he’s to go to work for the Ministry upon his graduation at the end of this year.  Cordelia feels young and stupid in his presence, but she smiles graciously for Madame Maxime and thanks the headmistress for all she’s done.  They embrace, and when the boy takes her hand, Cordelia is ready for what comes next.

She meets Igor Karkaroff in a quiet, snow-covered field, somewhere in Scandinavia.  She isn’t sure where, exactly, they are.  The French boy who got her here helps her escape the snowdrift they land in, and then shakes hands with the headmaster of the Durmstrang Institute, bowing his head out of respect.  The boy shakes Cordelia’s hand, too, smiles, and vanishes, leaving her to turn back to the already unimpressed eyes of Karkaroff.  He greets her in accented English, his words curt, and he then leads her into the woods off the field and along a large, fast-flowing river.

They reach Durmstrang in due time, a castle not nearly as impressive as Hogwarts.  Cordelia remembers Dumbledore’s wish that she keep Hogwarts in mind as she tours these others schools and interviews for these other jobs, but she doesn’t think he has anything to worry about.

Cordelia doesn’t speak to many people at Durmstrang.  They’re a cold, oddly brooding bunch, though a few of the boys take an interest in her pale skin, light hair, and American accent, and try to whisper sweet nothings in her ear in Ukrainian or Romanian, or something else she doesn’t understand. 

Her audience with Karkaroff is scheduled for that evening, just after dinner, and it’s short.  He obviously has a set of relevant interview questions, and he sticks to them.  He asks about her mother, and the moment of wide-eyed wonder he allows when Cordelia describes who her mother is in America and what she can do is the single most emotional moment she gets from him all evening.  He asks about her father, and he’s clearly unimpressed with the purely human lineage on that side.  He demands to see some of her magical skill and asks after what kind of work she’s done at Miss Robichaux’s.  His face is impassive as she speaks and performs, neither encouraging nor disheartening, and he sends her away with only a short wish for a good evening and no further mention of what she’s to do for the two more days she’s to be in their company.

So Cordelia fills her own time at Durmstrang.  It’s cold both inside and out, and she decides the fresh air is favorable to the judgmental leers of the Durmstrang students and faculty. The river is dark and deep and lovely in the few hours of daylight they get up here, and the stew they serve at lunch is hearty and filling.  Cordelia sits with a group of young students who aren’t yet as serious-minded as their older peers, and she hikes through the forest with them for a few hours in the afternoon, bugging them for details about growing up so far from the muggle world.  She can’t imagine this, living in enclaves and villages of like-minded people, the same way they can’t seem to fathom bearing the wondrous burden of magic amongst those who will never understand the power they have.

In the evening, one of the professors is giving a lecture about dark magic, which Cordelia has to leave halfway through.  She has no intention of playing God, which is exactly what the professor’s talk seems focused on, as he relates his knowledge of reanimation spells, and spells to kill enemies, and incantations that bring about the birth of hideous demon creatures.  She notices Karkaroff in a corner during the talk, smiling gently, almost fondly, and Cordelia knows that she won’t take a spot at Durmstrang, even if it’s offered.

On her last day at this last school, Cordelia wonders if anyone will remember that she has a flight to catch.  She’s scheduled to depart from Heathrow in two days’ time, following a reversed route back to Louis Armstrong International Airport, but though she has plenty of time to get back to London in time, she has no idea where she currently is or how far away the nearest airport is.

She doesn’t see Karkaroff again before leaving, but a boy knocks quietly on her door after breakfast with a note from the headmaster.  Karkaroff supposedly hopes she had a good stay and wishes her a safe trip back to America.  The boy, Viktor, is to see her back to Hogwarts, where transportation will be arranged back to Heathrow.

“I wait,” the boy says, once she’s looked up from reading the note, and he clicks his heels smartly and bows out of the room to allow her to finish packing.

They set out about an hour later, with the boy Viktor leaving Cordelia on the edge of Hogsmeade, the little town near Hogwarts.  She thanks him and he gallantly kisses her hand, bows his head to her, and disappears.  Cordelia goes to the Three Broomsticks to treat herself to a butter beer, and isn’t entirely surprised to meet Professor McGonagall there, the older woman sitting at the bar in her cloak and looking for all the world like a woman trying desperately not to look like she’s been waiting for her.

“I just came in for a drink,” McGonagall says, upon seeing Cordelia.  “How was your trip?”

Cordelia spends two more nights at Hogwarts, and then Hagrid flies her back to Heathrow and drops her, discreetly, at the back of the long-term parking lot.  He hugs her before letting her go, but she declines his offer to carry her bags into the terminal.  She doesn’t want to cause a stir.

She makes it home late the next day, after a tearful reunion with Myrtle at the airport.  Cordelia, despite her travel exhaustion, babbles incessantly about her trip, about the schools, about the spells she learned.  She hears the words tumbling out of her mouth without her tired mind fully comprehending them, and she doesn’t stop to breathe in all the time it takes to walk to the car and drive home.  But Myrtle just keeps grinning and nodding and asking to hear more, so she keeps talking, all the way back to Miss Robichaux’s.  Myrtle sees her inside, carrying one of her bags, and they chat in soft tones in the front hall.  Myrtle hugs her again, tells her how proud she is.  It’s only once Myrtle’s left that Cordelia turns to the portrait room and notices her mother, her long legs crossed at the knee, one over the other, as she perches on the edge of the piano bench.

Fiona lights a cigarette and eyes her daughter with a blank face only just barely masking the blunt disdain she usually shows her.  Myrtle seems sure that Cordelia is destined for greatness, but Fiona thinks her daughter is a useless worrywart without the power or authority to lead a Girl Scout troop, let alone a school—or a coven.

“My little jetsetter,” Fiona coos, her tone mocking.

Cordelia crosses her arms over her chest, suddenly exhausted, and plants her feet.  “Why are you here?”

“Is that any way to speak to your mother?”

“It is when she’s never really been a mother,” Cordelia snaps, and she sees something like hurt in Fiona’s eyes.  It’s satisfying; it gives her the strength to continue.  “Please leave, Fiona.  No one wants you here.”

“As Supreme,” Fiona reminds her, waving the cigarette around pompously, “it is my right to be here.  Sit awhile, babyface, and tell me all about your grand European adventures.”

“Don’t mock me,” Cordelia almost growls.  There are three things she will always fight for: Myrtle Snow, her school, and her dreams.  Her mother never appears without trying to stuff them all back down Cordelia’s throat until she chokes on them, gives them up, and bends to Fiona’s will.  Cordelia is a quiet girl, a good girl with a good head on her shoulders.  It is only her mother who makes her combative.  The situation is quickly becoming explosive, but Cordelia, for perhaps the first time in her life, doesn’t care.  “Why are you mocking me?  Why can’t you be happy for me, just this once?”

“Happy for you?  Happy that you want to lock yourself away in Bulgaria and wave sticks and dig up your plants?  Happy you want to abandon your own coven?”

“Myrtle says—”

This is the wrong track to take.  Fiona laughs uproariously, mocking her self-serious tone.  “’Myrtle says’!  Myrtle has a broomstick up her ass.  She got you those interviews, didn’t she?  She filled your head with this nonsense.”

“I can do it,” Cordelia argues.  “I’ve been tutoring here and I’m good with the girls.  I’m a better teacher than you’ve ever been.”

“Amen to that,” Fiona agrees, stabbing out her cigarette on the piano and lighting another to replace it almost immediately.  “So stay here and teach.”

“To be near you?”

“To be near your coven.”  Her mother takes a long drag and pours smoke from ravish-me red lips.  “Besides, this school is all you have.”

Cordelia feels like she missed part of the conversation.  “I’m sorry?” she asks, feeling suddenly dizzy.

“I heard from your European _friends_ yesterday,” Fiona drawls, unimpressed, and Cordelia’s stomach drops.

“You spoke to them?”

“They called,” Fiona agrees.  “The way they screamed at me, you’d think none of them had ever picked up a damn phone.”

Cordelia remembers Dumbeldore’s handshake and Madame Maxime’s laugh, and she hates that she has to grovel with her mother to hear what they had to say.  “And?”

“And they want you.”  Fiona grins.  “They all wanted you, even tall, dark, and probably homicidal up in Sweden, or wherever the hell they want to send you.” 

Fiona pauses, and tears of joy pool in Cordelia’s eyes.  She has her pick of the three European magic schools, some of the finest in the world.  She has to pack; she has to plan.  She has to tell Myrtle, who will be so proud.

“I told them you weren’t interested,” Fiona continues casually.  “I told them you’d reconsidered, and you’d decided that your place was here.  With your coven.  With your Supreme.”

Cordelia almost faints.  Her mother’s words are drowning her, and she was so stupid to have started celebrating before waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Fiona has always had a flair for the dramatic, and she loves nothing more than using it to stomp all over her daughter’s hopes and dreams.  One day, Cordelia will stop falling for Fiona’s tricks.  That day isn’t today.

Fiona’s eyes scan Cordelia’s horrified face, and she stands up and puts on her reasonable tone.  “Well, sweetheart, I need you here.  The coven needs you and your _expertise_.”  She pronounces it like the punchline to a joke.  Silly Cordelia—you have nothing to offer the world!  How dare you think otherwise?  “Who else can run Miss Robichaux’s?”

“You’re supposed to do it!” Cordelia suddenly shrieks, and she doesn’t care who else is here and who she has to wake up to make her point.  She can’t see her mother because of the tears in her eyes, and it’s better that way.  “Jesus Christ, Fiona!  I’m almost nineteen years old!  I want to have my own life.  I can’t do all the dirty work you don’t want to do for the rest of your miserable life.”

“That’s exactly what you’ll do, missy,” Fiona hisses, crossing the room in a few quick steps and shoving a bejeweled finger in Cordelia’s face.  Cordelia bears her teeth in a silent, primal snarl, and contemplates biting it off.  “That’s what you were put on this earth to do.  You are the daughter of the Supreme and you’re going to start acting like it.”

“I’m trying,” Cordelia yells back, slapping her mother’s hand away, “but you won’t let me.”

Fiona slaps her.  It isn’t the first time and it certainly won’t be the last, but it’s the first time Cordelia strikes out in retaliation.  Her palm connects perfectly with Fiona’s cheek, leaving an angry red outline of her hand on her mother’s skin, and it’s the most beautiful thing Cordelia has ever created in her life.

“I wish you were dead,” Cordelia says, her voice ragged with rage.

“Why?” Fiona bites back, probing delicately at her tender skin.  “I’m the only one who makes you fight for anything.”

“I’m tried of fighting,” Cordelia tells her.  Finally, the exhaustion of two weeks away and yet another argument with her mother hits her.  She sinks to the ground, in the shadow of some dead witch’s portrait, and pulls her knees to her chest.  “You have the world.  Why can’t you spread the wealth?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Fiona replies.  Her tone implies that she’s being completely serious.  She can’t see the issue with having it all and sharing none of it.  She kneels gracefully beside her daughter and smiles wickedly at her.  “I’ll find you some friends here.  Let’s go out and celebrate your new job.”

“I will always loathe you,” Cordelia whispers.  But her mother pretends not to hear her, and, with her usual, selfish attitude, gets Cordelia stuffed into a short black dress that has sat in her closet since Fiona sent it to her for her fourteenth birthday and kitten heels she packed just for the occasion.  Outside, Cordelia shivers in the chill night and thinks, again, how much she hates New Orleans. 

Fiona is electric, as always, and quickly gathers a trio of chatty sorority girls from Tulane along the walk down Bourbon Street.  She keeps throwing glances at Cordelia, who sulks along at the fringes of the group and makes little attempt to join the conversation, and it turns into a Fiona-centric night before they’ve even made it to a club. 

Fiona has to bribe the bouncer with long looks and heavy promises to get Cordelia through the door, as she’s the only one in the group too young to be there.  For some reason, these sorts of things still work on men, when they come from her mother.  Fiona’s wily charm should probably be considered one of the seven wonders, part of the test to become Supreme.  Knowing Fiona, she’ll think of that herself and have it added, so no other young witch will ever be able to take her place.

But inside the club, Cordelia orders herself a hurricane, because she’s never had one and feels that she should, and she starts to loosen up.  She’s never had a drink, period, mostly to spite her mother, but if Fiona wants her to celebrate, then she sure as hell will.  She talks to her new “friends,” who find her youth—she’s only three years younger than they, mind you—adorable and feed her shots until the room spins.

One of them has to help her to the bathroom after an hour or two.  As they’re stumbling back to Fiona and their friends at the bar, Cordelia trips over the heavy work boots of a handsome guy in jeans and a plaid buttondown.  He catches her, asks if she’s okay, and, while the sorority girl is distracted by his equally rugged friends, says, “I’m Hank.”

She won’t remember this in the morning—or for many years to come—but this is the first time she officially meets Hank Foxx.  “Delia,” she mumbles.  His face is swimming and she isn’t sure which of his six sets of eyes to focus on.  “Sorry about your boot.”

“Built to last,” he replies.  His laugh is easy—easy to listen to, easy to fall for.

“Thanks for catching me,” she adds, as an afterthought.  He looks like he wants to say something, or maybe he wants to kiss her, but before more can be said or done, Fiona appears at her arm and tugs Cordelia away, beckoning for the other girls to follow. They leave the club and Fiona dismisses the sorority sisters with a wave of the hand, never to be seen again.  Cordelia fights her mother all the way home, though it’s hard to argue when you can’t walk straight.  It’s harder when you’re bent over in a stranger’s bush, vomiting up Hell’s Kool-Aid and trying not to topple over in the heels your mother had to lend you for a hot night out on the town.

“You’re ruining my life,” Cordelia groans, as Fiona manhandles her up the stairs and into Miss Robichaux’s.  Her mother dumps her on the couch and stands over her for a moment, studying her face, and Cordelia can’t really see Fiona’s expression in the gloom.  She thinks—but doesn’t believe, because she’s drunk—that her mother looks almost warm, the scrunch of her eyes almost affectionate.

“I’m saving your life,” Fiona replies.

Cordelia promptly leans over the edge of the couch and throws up on the floor, then settles back into the cushions and dozes drunkenly.  She’s jetlagged and she’s hurt and she’s been pumped full of rum.  She was pulled away from a handsome boy—a man, really—before really getting the chance to know him.  She has no job prospects, outside of the one her mother is forcing on her, and she highly doubts that she will ever be the Supreme.

In the moment before she falls asleep, Cordelia decides to let Fiona clean up this single mistake of hers.  God knows, Cordelia will inevitably spend the rest of her life cleaning up after her mother.  Not once has Cordelia puked in Fiona’s presence.  She never bothered Fiona her about getting her period.  She’s cried in front of her plenty, but tears dry, and they don’t leave stains.  Fiona has looked out for herself, and she’s made damn sure Cordelia does the same. 

Whatever Fiona wants, she gets, and she wants nothing more than for Cordelia to mind the school while she traipses across the globe and forgets she has any real duties to which she must attend.  It doesn’t stack up to moving to a new country, but Cordelia knows she has her work cut out for her.  And she’s going to need a good night’s sleep now to face that every morning for the rest of her life.

She wonders, idly, if Myrtle would burn her at the stake for murdering Fiona, and she likes to think that she'd get away with it.  It’s a pleasant dream to balance out the disappointment and upset of the last few hours, and it sends Cordelia off into a blissful sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> A Coven/HP crossover. Yes, I went there.
> 
> And "years" implies multiple chapters, doesn't it? I'll see what other drabbles I can do!


End file.
